AI #186: The World Takes Notice

In the wake of Jacob Coxon’s resignation, and the resulting preference cascade, things have escalated quickly. The mainstream media picked it up. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei came out and said We Must Pace the Frontier, promising to take the unilateral first step of embedded investigators. OpenAI pledged to also take that step, and now both companies and Google are collaborating on safety. The people took notice, raising both the salience that AI might kill everyone and roughly doubling people’s estimates of how likely that is to happen, from a mean of ~15% to ~30%. Many politicians called for regulations, guardrails and emergency hearings in Congress. The most important thing became, and still is, to avoid political polarization. Through it all, I will keep reminding you to hold your fire, that attacks against Trump or against Republicans in general only make the situation worse, and that many Republicans, as I documented yesterday, are waking up and acting sensibly, including factions…